10 things to know about Yazidis

Yazidis fled Sunni fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. | AP Photo

By SARAH SMITH | 8/8/14 2:32 PM EDT

American airstrikes hit Iraq on Friday morning with a dual purpose: to protect American citizens in Erbil and to shield an ancient religious minority from the impending threat of genocide. The population under threat are the Iraqi Yazidis, who fled Sunni fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and are trapped on a mountain, fearing slaughter if they leave and facing starvation if they don’t. But who are the Yazidis? Here are 10 things to keep in mind.

1. About 500,000 Yazidis live in Iraq today, although there are about 700,000 total. They speak Kurdish and live in northern Iraq, many clustered near Sinjar. Although many consider themselves ethnically Kurdish, they’re a distinct group from the Kurds.

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2. Most who follow the Yazidi faith live in Iraq. While followers also live in Georgia, Turkey and Armenia, many have fled persecution to Australia, Canada, Germany and the U.S.

3. A large community of Yazidi refugees settled in Lincoln, Nebraska. As the crisis in Iraq escalated, the Yazidis of Lincoln took to the streets to plead for help for those stranded in Sinjar.

4. The Yazidi religion draws partially from Zoroastrianism and from Islamic Sufism, according to the Yezedi Human Rights Organization. They worship seven angels, the central of which is the fallen “Peacock Angel” — which has led to allegations of devil worship, although the angel was restored to heaven. They have a Christian-like baptism and pass down their religious traditions orally.

5. The religion claims its origins in an Umayyad sheik who was born around 1075 C.E. His tomb, in Lalish, Iraq, is now a popular pilgrimage site for the Yazidis — but it may now be turning into a refugee camp.

6. ISIL calls the Yazidi devil-worshippers and sees destroying religions minorities like the Yazidi and the Iraqi Christians as part of the way to build its caliphate in the region. ISIL isn’t the first to first hunt the Yazidi: The group has faced persecution from historic empires and modern terrorist attacks even before ISIL.

7. Past persecution included massacres by the Ottoman Empire. The Yazidi people speak of surviving 72 massacres in that time alone. In Turkey, they had to carry identity cards that listed their religions as “XXX.” The Yazidi haven’t fared well in the past few decades, either. One instance of violence was in 2007, when truck bombings ripped through Yazidi-heavy villages and killed over 500. The State Department reported that 33 Yazidis from Mosul were arrested in July 1996 and still unaccounted for by 2002.

8. Although the Yazidi were persecuted under Saddam Hussein, life didn’t get any better for them once he was deposed. When Hussein left, some Sunni Muslim groups radicalized — and the Yazidis were on their target list.

9. Some Yazidis, though, actually fled into Iraq in recent years. The civil war in Syria, as The Economist put it, pits “Kurds against Islamist radicals,” causing the Yazidis of Syria to race across Iraq’s northern border into Kurdish-controlled areas.

10. Currently, about 40,000 Yazidis are stranded on a mountain just outside of Sinjar — their ancestral home — starving and dying of thirst. If they leave, they face getting slaughtered. Sinjar is the ancestral home of the Yazidi. The ISIL has slaughtered the people it’s found, posting gruesome pictures to social media showing bodies and ISIL militants holding guns to the heads of men lying on the ground.